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career development

specialist paramedic

A comparison of paramedic practice with that of an emergency care practitioner

02 July 2014

Volume 6 · Issue 7

ISSN (print): 1759-1376

ISSN (online): 2041-9457

Abstract

This article, following on from the previous article by Gaisford (2014), set out to further quantify the day-to-day work of the modern ambulance service. A particular focus was given to the comparison of emergency care practitioner (ECP) and paramedic practice. Non-patient-identifiable audit data from two consecutive years of practice was analysed and compared, looking in particular at the rates the different clinicians treated patients at scene and referred to specialist units. Seven specific categories of presenting complaint were analysed in depth to illustrate where and why the ECP was performing better than the paramedic at treating patients in the community. The audit of the data showed that in all areas the ECP sends less patients to the emergency department than the paramedic; this was found to be due to both the enhanced range of skills and interventions the ECP has available to him/her as well as the greater level of clinical reasoning and knowledge possessed by the ECP.

This article forms the second in a series of reviews of pre-hospital clinician audit data designed to help quantify what the ambulance service and its clinicians actually do. In the first article, Gaisford (2014) focused on examining the work of an emergency care practitioner (ECP) working within a large town in the south of England. This second article compares audit data from the same ECP with a paramedic working on a double-crewed ambulance (DCA) from the same ambulance station over a two-year period.

The analysis undertaken for this article represents the combined number of patients seen by both clinicians: a total of 3 955 individual patients. The audit tool used for this task was the same tool as used and described by Gaisford (2014), and as such is not further described here.

These tables illustrate that whether paramedic or ECP, the average work load and patient demographics are relatively similar.

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Emergency care practitioner